As the owner of a place in.north central Arkansas, I can certainly
identify with the use of a plane to travel around the Ozarks. The
roads are very twisty and hilly. It takes about 1.7 hours to fly there
and about 5 hours to drive.
Larry Snyder
Washington, Missouri
Mountain View, Arkansas
N99340
On Dec 29, 2008, at 9:21 PM, "Harry L. Francis"
<[email protected]> wrote:
Though Wal-Mart could, in theory, save millions of dollars in annual
operating expenses by downsizing a substantial portion of its fleet
to VLJs, it has no plans to do so, choosing, instead, to maximize
the efficiency of its Lears by maintaining a load factor of plus-
five passengers per flight leg.
“Our load factor is 5.2, so we really get incredible efficiency out
of these airplanes,” Wal-Mart director of Global Travel Services Dua
ne Futch said in an interview with Business Travel News. “We’re
not just going out and dropping one person off. They always travel w
ith a team that is going to do the job they have to do in the field.
We don’t just drop that team off. That airplane is constantly movin
g. The typical Wal-Mart airplane will make between three and six sto
ps a day: picking up people, dropping people off … moving them to an
other location.”
As is the case with many commercial air-taxi operations, Wal-Mart’s
fleet management needs are sufficiently complex to demand more than
an off-the-shelf management solution to handle passenger, crew, main
tenance, inspection and other scheduling and back-office tasks. Buil
ding on Atlanta-based Seagil Software’s BART aviation management sys
tem, WalMart programmers fashioned a series of custom application ex
tensions maximizing efficiency while retaining the flexibility to qu
ickly change everything from routings to passenger lists in response
to unforeseen circumstances requiring immediate attention (a comput
er system meltdown at a remote division, for example.)
Like many new-generation air-taxi operators, Wal-Mart Aviation also
recognizes the importance of full-service, high-level ground
services (think DayJets’ DayPorts). Not only does the company own an
d operate a private ATC tower at Rogers field, a wholly owned FBO at
the airport, 22-year-old Beaver Lake Aviation, supplies everything
from free popcorn to computerized weather tracking, executive confer
ence rooms, crew quiet and snooze rooms, exercise facilities, washin
g machines and courtesy transportation to nearby restaurants.
And if all this isn’t enough to convince skeptics that Wal-Mart Avia
tion is really just an air-taxi company in corporate clothing, consi
der this: The company traces its history back to 1954 when Wal-Mart
founder Sam Walton bought a single-engine Ercoupe 415 and began flyi
ng it to stores in Arkansas and adjacent states because it was faste
r than driving between locations on twisting Ozark Mountain roads.
